No particular theme, just a few books fellow science fiction bibliophiles might find of interest.
Recent Library Acquisitions: A Few Random Interesting Books
February 12th, 2013Shoegazer Sunday: Murnau’s “Winter Breath”
February 10th, 2013Here’s the pleasant, verging on ambient “Winter Breath” by Italian band Murnau.
I’m guessing they’re named after the German film director.
The Case of the Crappy Comic Book Caper
February 10th, 2013I’m surprised that neither Dwight nor Murray Newman picked up on this one. Lonnie Blevins, a former investigator at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, has been charged with stealing over $140,000 worth of vintage comic books. The comic books were purportedly taken from evidence seized from Anthony Chiofalo, a lawyer accused of embezzling more than $9 million from a client. Chiofalo’s own lawyer says it’s possible more than $1 million worth of collectables was taken from his client.
When Blevins (allegedly) tried to sell them for about half their value at a Chicago comics convention the dealer became suspicious. To allay their suspicions, Blevins “let them photograph his Texas driver’s license and showed his badge proving he was an investigator with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.”
It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to crack this case. I could actually see this working if he was very careful and only sold one or two titles at various shows or shops, maybe mixed in with a few lesser titles he purchased. (I’d be interested in hearing some of the titles he allegedly tried to fence.) But trying to sell a whole bunch of valuable comics all at once? Yeah, that’s going to raise some flags.
More on Chiofalo’s collection, which included “a baseball signed by Babe Ruth, a first edition Playboy and the first ever Batman comic book, worth about $900,000…a boxing robe worn by Muhammad Ali, a signed first edition of Mario Puzo’s novel, The Godfather, and a baseball helmet signed by Pete Rose.”
(Hat tip: Doug Potter’s Facebook page.)
It’s Raining Gene Wolfe Review Copies!
February 7th, 2013Any year is a good year to read Gene Wolfe, but it seems that right now we’re in a Gene Wolfe Year, or even a Gene Wolfe Sesquiennial, which started with his induction into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame and continued with him being named Nebula Grandmaster.
Then Michael Andre-Driussi (the author of Lexicon Urthus and other useful Wolfe critical works) published this:
And sent me a review copy, which I hope to get to shortly. I also have copies of Gate of Horn, Book of Silk for sale through Lame Excuse Books; just drop me a line if you want one.
And this just arrived in the mail:
That’s Shadows of the New Sun: Stories in Honor of Gene Wolfe, edited by Bill Fawcett and J.E. Mooney, which is due out in August. Complete contents here.
We’ll see if I can’t review both of those here in the coming months.
Ironically, I’m actually reading another Wolfe-related book with the same title right now: Peter Wright’s Shadows of the New Sun: Wolfe on Writing/Writers on Wolfe, which includes the interview I did with him for Nova Express. When I had lunch with him at the Chicago Worldcon, Gene said even he didn’t have a copy of the Wright book.
Hopefully Gene will be able to come to the San Antonio Worldcon. He said he was going to try to make it.
Shoegazer Sunday: Skywave’s “Nothing Left to Say”
February 3rd, 2013I don’t know much about Skywave beyond what’s on their MySpace page, which mentioned they’re from Fredericksburg, Virginia. With that deeply uninformative introduction out of the way, here’s the deeply reverb-drenched “Nothing Left to Say” off their album Synthstatic.
The Science Fictional Ruin of the Bulgarian Communist Party Headquarters
February 2nd, 2013Missed this when it came out last year, but this Daily Mail piece on the ruin of the Bulgarian Communist Party headquarters has some awesome pictures of very science fictional ruins.
Reminds me of those equally science fictional Yugoslavian Communist monuments. Monuments to an illusionary future by regimes that ignored their overwhelming, oppressive failure in the present.
For the Lovecraft Collector Who Has Everything
January 31st, 2013For a mere $3,000, the passport of H.P. Lovecraft’s ex-wife Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft can be yours!
As a one-of-a-kind item, that’s actually cheaper than many of Lovecraft’s rarer books…
Library Additions: Three Clark Ashton Smith Items
January 29th, 2013I managed to pick up three relatively uncommon Clark Ashton Smith items from Heritage Auction’s weekly book auction:
I’d long heard that Roy A. Squires’ small press chapbooks were very well made, and I finally was able to snag a couple of them at a reasonable price.
I bought the Cockcroft because, well, I’m slightly fanatical about collecting bibliographic material, but also because I was hoping it might have some things not in Emperor of Dreams, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. I really would like a better Smith bibliography, as Emperor of Dreams is perhaps the most confusingly organized bibliography I’ve ever seen.
Unlike a complete H. P. Lovecraft collection, a complete Clark Ashton Smith collection is probably within my means, but it’s a pretty long-term goal…
“Movie 43 is the Citizen Kane of awful.”
January 28th, 2013So sayeth Roger Ebert about the latest movie from Peter Farrelly. When Ebert says a movie is worse than Freddy Got Fingered, you know that all lower bounds of the barrel have been breached.
More nuggets:
Farrelly was going for a 21st century version of “The Groove Tube” and “Kentucky Fried Movie,” two very funny, very raunchy and very influential sketch-comedy flicks of the mid-1970s.
The only thing “Movie 43” has in common with those movies is it’s in color.
Also:
Academy Award winner Halle Berry no longer can cite “Catwoman” as the low point of her career.
Ebert gave it Zero Stars. Yet, for some reason, his readers have given it four. Go figure.
Shoegazer Sunday: Echodrone’s “Time”
January 27th, 2013Here’s Echodrone’s cover of The Alan Parsons’ Project’s “Time” from their Mixtape for Duckie covers album. The video has less than a hundred views as I type this, so I’m happy to showcase something that actually qualifies as new! Most cover albums do nothing for me, even by artists I really like (see also: Scratch My Back and Strange Little Girls), but everything I’ve heard from this I liked so much, I just went ahead and bought it
See how long it takes you to figure out what the video is about, something I twigged to very early, and which ties into themes explored in their previous videos.